The Latest from Big Think

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A termite mound
Smarter building materials can control indoor temperatures without external power.
A monochrome picture depicting a band embracing the philosophy of music.
Music is part of the human experience, which is why some philosophers have written about it. Some had wacky ideas.
An artist's rendering of a spacecraft near an asteroid.
Whether you call it 10 quintillion, 10 million trillion, or 10 billion billion, it's a 1 followed by 19 zeroes.
A man is using mitti attar on a clay pot in front of a fire.
In Kannauj, perfumers have been making monsoon-infused mitti attar for centuries.
A comparison of two rice plants focusing on their immunity.
The technology could yield "made-to-order resistance genes" to protect crops against pathogens and pests.
A tooth and a piece of wood juxtaposed in an unsettling manner.
A 1.5-million-year-old hominin bone shows signs that the victim was eaten by lions — and humans.
standard model structure
Some constants, like the speed of light, exist with no underlying explanation. How many "fundamental constants" does our Universe require?
A woman poses in front of the letter x in a black and white photo.
The use of the letter x as an unknown is a relatively modern convention.
A man exploring quantum computing in a room with red lights.
Nature may not allow us full access to the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
A person making medical breakthroughs by looking through a microscope.
Ethicist and doctor Simon Whitney argues that society's overly cautious approach to medical research is blocking breakthroughs.
Raisin bread expanding Universe
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
A woman reading news with a cup of coffee.
We can no longer approach the news as passive consumers.
A group of silver balls resembling mercury surrounding a statue of a man influenced by Maya culture.
Today, many Maya sites are polluted with toxic levels of mercury. The contamination likely originated from cinnabar paints and art.
Ice harvesters once made a living from frozen lakes and ponds, but the work was strenuous and dangerous. Then refrigeration changed everything.
An image of a plant with green leaves on it.
Researchers estimate there may be as many as ten million trillion trillion phages on Earth — that's 10 with 30 zeros after it.
An image of the earth resonating in space.
The Schumann resonances are the background hum of the entire planet. But they don't affect humans in any way.